The Top 10 Most Valuable Travel Brands of 2014

Priceline should be proud, and Emirates is still killing it when it comes to its brand value. Meanwhile, American Airlines, fresh off the merger, is a lot bigger brand now.

— Rafat Ali

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Travel brands — especially airlines — don’t usually show up in the list of global most valuable, loved or biggest brand rankings done by various brand agencies such as Interbrand, Futurebrand and others. So when they do show up in rankings, like the Brand Finance‘s most valuable brands list of the top 500 companies, we decide to pay attention and highlight them. Last year we did a story about the top most valuble airline brands of 2013, where Emirates topped the list.

In this list by Brand Finance, the value of a brand is decided by using the Royalty Relief methodology which determines the value a company would be willing to pay to license its brand as if it did not own it. This approach involves estimating the future revenue attributable to a brand and calculating a royalty rate that would be charged for the use of the brand. More info on the methodology here.

In the table below, we’re extracting the travel brands out of the list of top 500 brands. The top two aren’t a surprise, these are huge companies, and their brand value is derived from their duopoly position in the commercial aircraft market.

Priceline.com, meanwhile, is one of the world’s biggest travel companies by market cap, and its brand value comes from that, and is the only pureplay online travel company in this list. The only traditional travel agency on the list is British-based TUI.

In the airlines set on this list, Emirates continues to be the most valuable brand, followed by Delta. American Airlines, meanwhile, has done a huge leap in its brand value, primarily as a result of its merger with US Airways. Related, it has also pulled off what could arguably be one of the smoothest rebranding/redesign of large airlines in history. Singapore Airlines, meanwhile, has all kinds of worries, its brand value being the least of them.

Rank

Rank

Brand Value ($ Millions)

Brand Value ($ Millions)

2014

2013

Name

2014

2013

71

194

Airbus

14599

5636

107

105

Boeing

10943

9249

178

260

Priceline.com

6950

4147

234

287

Emirates

5481

4098

286

369

Delta

4736

3289

298

–

American Airlines

4563

1767

331

326

Lufthansa

4165

3638

360

388

TUI Travel

3960

3162

379

415

United

3831

2992

458

398

Singapore Air

3250

3117

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Photo Credit: Stars of the current Priceline.com ad campaign, William Shatner and Kaley Cuoco.